Relational databases and other representations require fixed structures (tables, queries, spreadsheets, etc) which must be built by programmers to store information. Associated structures such as interfaces and programmed modules must be built to allow the user to access and manipulate information. These require a great deal of programming time and effort to build and maintain. The resulting structures are only capable of representing particular content, organized in particular forms. When the content of a conventional database needs to be extended, new tables, fields, queries and associated objects have to be programmed. Design of the table structures and programmed objects is also ad hoc in the sense that two independent programmers will generally devise distinct structures to represent the same domain of information. This means that transfer of information from one database to another is difficult, involving dedicated programming tasks to ‘translate’ or map information from one application to another. Integration of diverse information stored in a variety of different structures (e.g., databases, spreadsheets) is difficult: a new database needs to be designed and programmed to import and combine various elements of information, taking into account the ad hoc rules of the original systems. Considerable effort is required to learn the programming methods used in each system as there is little standardization across systems devised by different programmers.
Conventional representations of information split information into two types: conceptual information and empirical information. Conceptual information is programmed or ‘hard-wired’ into the system design—in the construction of tables, queries, and programmed functions. Empirical information is ‘soft-coded’ as data, entered through user interfaces. Only the latter—essentially content of tables—appears transparently as information. Conceptual information underlying the system design—including implementation of calculation functions, correspondences of various fields in different tables, inter-table relations, etc—is only visible by viewing construction of objects, and it is difficult to find any methods to systematically navigate, extract, represent or manipulate this information.